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Lot 37

 

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"I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

The 1950s and early 1960s were punctuated by extended periods of travel between Paris and Bombay for Akbar Padamsee. This constant movement across the diverse terrains of Europe and India prompted him to explore landscape painting.

Transcending notions of time and space, these landscapes... "I like to think of the surface of my paintings as an archaeological site where you can uncover surface after surface." - AKBAR PADAMSEE

The 1950s and early 1960s were punctuated by extended periods of travel between Paris and Bombay for Akbar Padamsee. This constant movement across the diverse terrains of Europe and India prompted him to explore landscape painting.

Transcending notions of time and space, these landscapes became the central focus of Padamsee's artistic practice during this period. "Rather than an intent to describe the natural world per se, the artist's object was the total conceptual and metaphysical ken of his visual environment, with his paintings impressing an immediate perceptual experience that relied on expression and sensation rather than realist recognition." (Beth Citron, "Akbar Padamsee's Artistic Landscapes of the '60s", Bhanumati Padamsee and Annapurna Garimella eds., Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language, Mumbai: Marg Publications and Pundole Art Gallery, 2010, p. 195)

Padamsee's art gained new exposure during his travels to New York and across North America on a John D Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1963?64. His works from these two years depict his first move away from "the use of landscape for formalist study or the rehearsal of the Western (especially French) classical tradition." (Citron, pp. 203, 206)

The present lot, painted in 1964, is a wonderful example of Padamsee's period of movement away from figurative landscapes and the steps toward the development of his Metascapes. One notices the remnants of the monochromes from his earlier Grey Works coexisting with the early indication of the fuller colour palette that would emerge in his later, brighter landscapes.

Padamsee's limited and somewhat subdued palette from this period created landscapes that contained some recognisable elements from nature but were otherwise stripped of all geographic specificity. In the present lot, elements of a landscape and the natural world are represented through imagery that combines "nearly abstract fields of rich colour" as well as indications of a blue water body and some land mass. (Citron, p. 203) Padamsee abandons the use of perspective and instead, builds the scene plane by plane, using varying swatches of colour to bring the different elements in this lot to life.

Such works from the 1960s "tend towards stark and dark reduction, resulting in compositions that appear significantly more conceptualized than the earlier series, if still legible and oriented as landscapes... by formally pulling back and presenting angular, broad panoramas of unpopulated land, Padamsee draws the viewer's attention to the rhetorical emptiness of these landscapes; that is, rather than these vistas appearing coincidentally or casually as if there are no people passing through them, they demonstrate a conscious, strategic approach to appear exclusively non-figural." (Citron, pp. 206, 208) Here, as in other works from this period, Padamsee constructs a landscape indicative of neither space nor time, focussing only on form, structure, and colour.

The present lot, thus, becomes a demonstration of Padamsee's rigorous and disciplined approach to his craft. "His method is quite contrary to that of the expressionists who use colour directly to express the turbulence or violence of their emotions without subjecting it to any discipline. In Padamsee's work, colour is always subordinate to a structural basis. The texture of the paintings done in this period is by no means a superfluous detail; it is part of the meaning of the picture." (Sham Lal, "Akbar Padamsee", Padamsee: Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai: Vakils Publications, p. 8)

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